Yet tea - industry veteran Giri Kadurugamuwa, who heads the Rainforest Alliance's ground operations in Sri Lanka, has already trained more than 30,000
tea farmers since 2012; he is quite unfazed by the additional 60,000 smallholder farmers slated for training in the near future.
The FFS has now become a model approach for
farmer education in Asia and many parts of Africa and Latin America, and has
since been used with a wide range of crops including cotton,
tea, coffee, cocoa, pepper, vegetables, small grains and legumes.